What is a valid key?

[dormando]

Any independent byte (... octet) that looks like a space will be treated 
as a command token separator in the text protocol. In the binary 
protocol it's just a length.

So if you have a utf8 character that's a valid non-space high byte for 
the first byte, but the second byte is a space, it'd break. I'm not even 
sure if that happens though.

We're trying not to promote people get into situations where their keys 
will work with just one protocol or another, but we certainly can't stop 
people...

-Dormando

Kieran Benton wrote:
> No I don't think so :)
> 
> But it is very convenient to just have to not worry about falling foul
> of not supported characters in keys. Its obviously an easy matter if you
> are building a site that is for use with memcached from the start, but
> if you are moving to memcached from another cache system (as I am) then
> it is a bit of a worry if delimiters you have previously been using
> might now be treated as erroneous.
> 
> Are we saying that as long as you use UTF-8 for the key, and that it is
> not longer that 250 bytes, then all is fine with both text and binary
> protocols? If so then I think we should update the docs to say so and be
> happy :)
> 
> - Kieran
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: memcached-bounces at lists.danga.com
> [mailto:memcached-bounces at lists.danga.com] On Behalf Of Dustin Sallings
> Sent: 20 December 2007 17:58
> To: a.
> Cc: memcached at lists.danga.com
> Subject: Re: What is a valid key?
> 
> 
> On Dec 20, 2007, at 8:57, a. wrote:
> 
>> I haven't seen the server from inside (I only wrote a client), so  
>> maybe it's anoob question, but
>>
>> why do we have to treat the key as a "string"? Cannot be just  
>> treated as an array of bytes (whihc cannot contain some values  
>> listed earlier)? So we do not have to care about codepages and  
>> encodings and such?
> 
> 
> 	You could do that in the server using the binary protocol, but
> the  
> text protocol wouldn't be able to deal with it.  It'd be good to  
> remain limited to the lowest common denominator.
> 
> 	I don't think anyone *really* cares about being able to use a
> jpeg as  
> a key.
>